Blogs

An Introduction to Strategic Foresight for Law Firms and Legal Departments

By David Kamien posted 10-10-2023
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In today's dynamic legal landscape, strategic foresight (SF) and horizon scanning are indispensable for proactive law firms and legal departments. SF enables informed decision-making, risk minimization, and the identification of emerging opportunities to help firms anticipate and adapt to industry trends and demands. Horizon scanning further supports this adaptability by consistently analyzing crucial industry data, offering insights essential for navigating the legal sector confidently. This article outlines the significance and function of these two vital tools in contemporary law practice. What is Strategic Foresight? Strategic foresight (corporate ...
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From Lake Houses to Literacy: Making Sense of the New Data Landscape

By Jordan Galvin posted 09-27-2023
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Introduction I remember the first time I read the definition of Data Management: “the development, execution, and supervision of plans, policies, programs, and practices that deliver, control, protect, and enhance the value of data and information assets throughout their life cycles,” Wow—that’s heavy. With such an overstuffed definition, it isn’t surprising many folks are either intimidated or bored by the mention of data management. Simply, data management is the recognition that data is an asset. If I asked you to think about all the things that allow your organization to exist and grow in market share, social leadership, and profitability, a ...
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Digital Transformation in Knowledge Management: Where Were We 5 years ago and Where Are We Now?

By Brian Balistreri posted 04-12-2023
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Please enjoy this blog posted on behalf of the author, Jack Shepherd, Legal Practice Lead, iManage. 2018 perhaps marked the peak of the first wave of interest in AI in the legal industry. Much of these efforts were focused around contract review and due diligence, but extensive discussion also took place around the relevance of these tools for knowledge management. That year marked a decision point for many law firms: what was their long-term knowledge strategy? At least three types of strategies were pursued. The first was to get seduced by AI. Vendors would come in with messages that AI could solve all your knowledge management problems, ...
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Use KM to Drive Your BD and Marketing Success

By Brian Balistreri posted 02-28-2023
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***Please enjoy this blog posted on behalf of the co-authors, Rachel Shields Williams, Director, Knowledge Management, Sidley Austin LLP and Erin Baxendale, Director of Business Development and Marketing, Clients and Industries, Sidley Austin LLP. Knowledge Management (KM) and Business Development (BD)/Marketing are the wonder powers of a law firm. KM helps organize and maintain systems that track the firm’s experience with Clients, Matters, and People. BD/Marketing packages this experience in a variety of ways to help create awareness and win new business for the firm. Both groups leverage lawyer work product and relationships to help drive revenue ...
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Managing Culture and Shifting Mindset: Follow-Up Blog Post

By Brian Balistreri posted 02-14-2023
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**Please enjoy this blog posted on behalf of the author Madeline Boyer, Director, Innovation Lab, Reed Smith LLP. I have often said one of my superpowers as an anthropologist is to quickly assimilate into new environments. This ability to observe, identify, and model the norms of a new group was honed through my doctoral ethnographic fieldwork on coworking spaces in the early 2010s. It has been both a boon and a challenge as my career has evolved: it allows me to build credibility and understanding with relative speed at any new client or job but has also built in a bit of intellectual wanderlust. When I was in consulting, I never had a great answer ...
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Simple Ways to Leverage Your People Power with Technology

By Melanie Segraves posted 11-18-2022
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Whenever there's a group swapping horror stories about work, I bring up that I was the schmuck supporting DocuSign at a law firm when Covid happened. If you work in KM, that joke will likely make you laugh and cry. In reality, I knew I was (and still am) one of the lucky ones. There are a couple of reasons I felt lucky during peak Covid . For one, I had a job, and many people I knew did not. More than that, though, I worked with a supportive and caring group of people. The moral of this lengthy intro is that the quality of the people we work with is most often the factor that determines our success. Whether you work in the legal industry, retail, or a ...
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How to Bring Firm Leadership, InfoSec, and IT Together on Data-Sensitive Solutions

By Christiane Matuch posted 10-31-2022
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Please enjoy this blog posted on behalf of Jay Russell, Principal, Lotis Blue Consulting. Law firms own a gold mine of data. Their leaders know it. Their attorneys know it. Their business professionals know it. And 3 rd party advisors and technology vendors know it. If these data are so valuable, why not harvest their value and enjoy the benefits? Not so fast. A complicated web of changing business priorities, data sensitivity and privacy issues, layers of leader and InfoSec/IT approvals and requirements have proved to be daunting. What can this process look like in real life? A “solution leader” introduces an idea that will require leveraging ...
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Exciting Enhancements in Transcript Management Technology

By Daniel Wood posted 10-04-2022
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Please enjoy this blog posted on behalf of the author, Rachel Bailey, Product Marketing Manager, Opus2. People want to be able to easily open new software and start working. This is not unique to legal practitioners, but feels particularly important when time is ticking on an important lawsuit. The most useful software translates processes that legal teams have done manually for years and makes those processes quicker, easier, and more efficient. Technological enhancements can relieve last-minute headaches during trial prep and allow practitioners to do what they do best — think strategically about issues — not spend time manually formatting or annotating ...
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Taxonomies - Why You Should Standardize Terminology Across All Marketing and Knowledge Management Systems

By Rachel Shields Williams posted 07-19-2022
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Please enjoy this blog post authored by Rachel Shields-Williams, Director, Knowledge Management, Sidley Austin LLP. As our technology stacks grow and we begin to break down data silos across our firms, these processes often expose our firm’s need for a standard taxonomy for each concept used across systems like Industry, Area of Law, Courts, among other data points. This process requires threading a delicate balance between how the outside world describes a given attribute and how members of your firm want to describe it (and how they have described it historically). Any taxonomy should have enough structural integrity to withstand the scrutiny of practicing ...
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Building Client Relationships: Proven Methods of Building Relationships Between KM and Clients

By Glenn Hoxie posted 05-09-2022
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Please enjoy this blog post authored by Glenn Hoxie, Senior Project Manager, Practice Innovation and Legal Solutions, Paul Hastings LLP. Many of us have tested our green thumbs in the last two years. Some of us have managed to create a beautiful garden, grow the perfect gardenia, and learn from those constant challenges which impact the new gardener. As one of my interviewees shared, building and maintaining a client relationship is akin to growing a garden and making it thrive. My conversations with industry leaders in the Knowledge Management, Legal Project Management, and Pricing areas resulted in other unique ideas, suggestions, and examples around ...
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KM’S Role In The Lawyer Lifecycle

By Adam Dedynski posted 02-18-2022
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Please enjoy this blog post co-authored by Adam Dedynski, Knowledge and Development Professional Support Lawyer, White & Case and Jenni Tellyn, Knowledge Management and Learning Consultant, 3Kites Consulting Ltd. The steady stream of new joiners and leavers at law firms has turned into a torrent. As we move into the next phase of living with Covid-19, plans for career reassessment that had been put on hold are being reactivated and there is a marked increase in activity in the employment market. This blog seeks to provide practical examples of ways KM teams can add value at each stage of the lawyer lifecycle from onboarding, through refresher sessions ...
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Best Way to Onboard Lateral and New Associates with KM Resources

By Caroline Sweeney posted 01-05-2022
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Please enjoy this blog post co-authored by Shefali Lakhani, Knowledge Management Lawyer, Proskauer and Caroline Sweeney, Director of Knowledge Management & Innovation, Dorsey & Whitney. COVID continues to have a lasting impact on the legal market. Not only has it accelerated the use and adoption and of technology, but it’s also affected job opportunities, hiring, and retention. As associates are snatching opportunities to move to their dreams jobs, to firms with better work life balance, and to other new opportunities, firms are experiencing a large influx and outflux of associates. As new members join the firm, they need to be trained on, among ...
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ILTA Europe Peer Group Meeting Recap: Data Analytics for KM Teams

By Mercedes Oppon-Kusi posted 09-30-2021
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Data is central to legal KM, yet formal data strategies and capabilities are often defined poorly, if at all, and dedicated data teams generally sit outside KM functions in finance, business intelligence, or marketing. Still, data is a hot topic. Big Data and artificial intelligence have raised new possibilities around how data can be harvested and exploited, and GDPR has pushed data and compliance to the front of the agenda for many firms. Failing to build an effective data strategy means that KM systems and processes remain fragmented, data quality and insight are impaired, and efficiency diminished. To help us navigate this complicated and crucial area, ...
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Business Efficiency Tools We Can’t Live Without Post-Covid

By Tara Patterson posted 09-10-2021
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Please enjoy this blog post authored by Tara Patterson, Marketing Technology Manager at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP. To say priorities have shifted greatly over the past year and a half is an understatement. Many of us have been tasked with developing and implementing tools and processes allowing for more remote collaboration. Requests have grown in complexity with even quicker turnaround times expected – mainly because we have learned through this pandemic that our workforce is adaptable. To accommodate this progression, we now have technological solutions in our (virtual) tool belts that are indispensable. You literally cannot be efficient ...
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Knowledge Management and IT: Push and Pull - Recap

By Catherine Hanley posted 06-08-2021
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Please enjoy this blog post recap from Kate Hanley, Knowledge Management Lawyer, Sidley Austin LLP. On June 2, 2021, ILTA hosted a roundtable on "Knowledge Management and IT: Push and Pull." The participants were Caroline Sweeney (Director of Knowledge Management and Innovation) and Paul Miller (Chief Information Officer) from Dorsey & Whitney, and Gwyn McAlpine (Director of Knowledge Management Services) and Rick Howell (Chief Information Officer) from Perkins Coie. The roundtable was moderated by Kate Hanley, Knowledge Management Lawyer at Sidley Austin LLP How do you define 'modern' Knowledge Management? At its core, KM is about sharing knowledge ...
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Knowledge Management As Educators

By Adam Dedynski posted 04-15-2021
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This blog is part of our “Foundations of Knowledge Management” and “The Evolving Role of Education” series. Knowledge Management (KM) professionals can play a vital, and often varied, role when it comes to delivering formal learning. KM lawyers create and deliver training on legal topics, law librarians provide legal research or database training, and innovation and KM managers provide training on technology or processes. How this is shaped and delivered is always evolving, particularly with the move toward remote working. This blog outlines some of those trends and ideas for delivering engaging education. Planning Spending time planning and structuring ...
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Knowledge Management Round-Up for 2020: A Bright Spot in a Cruddy Year

By Gwyneth McAlpine posted 01-04-2021
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2020 was rough, and we’re moving on. But on the bright side, ILTA members created another treasure trove of useful content on knowledge management (KM) topics, the quality of which was particularly good this year. In case you were distracted at some point in 2020 (and who wasn’t?) and missed some of this excellent material, I have cataloged it below. It can be hard to filter the many recordings and articles produced by ILTA each year to only KM topics. I generally look for works produced by KM contributors for a KM audience, plus a sprinkling of topics that are interesting to me. The range of topics was a little narrower this year than in years past, which ...
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Successful Knowledge Project Management

By Adam Dedynski posted 10-21-2020
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SUCCESSFUL KNOWLEDGE PROJECT MANAGEMENT This blog, part of our “Foundations of Knowledge Management” series, provides some tips and techniques for managing and delivering knowledge projects of any size. Whether you are new to doing this or a seasoned project manager, here is a checklist for getting a project started through to completing it and post-project analysis. FIVE KEY FACTORS FOR PROJECT SUCCESS Knowledge professionals will find themselves, sometimes inadvertently, managing or being involved in projects at some stage. Five key factors will help make projects a success: 1. Pressure for change: sometimes knowledge projects just have ...
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Thinking About Working From Home? So Is Everyone Else....

By Michael Ertel posted 10-09-2020
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Thinking about working from home? So is everyone else… Back in January 2020, a group of ILTA volunteers gathered (in person) to discuss content for the coming year. One topic was the future of remote working at law firms. At that time, many firms already allowed remote working—some operated as fully remote firms and others allowed remote working a few days week either firm-wide or on a case-by-case basis. We also knew that while some firms embraced the concept of a fully remote work environment, others felt it would negatively impact corporate culture and productivity. We thought it would be an interesting exercise to investigate the future of remote ...
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Change Management Tools for Success - Recap

By Rachel Shields Williams posted 08-07-2020
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ILTA recently hosted a session on “Change Management Tools for Success” with Brianna Leung, Director of Strategy and Marketing, Much Law and Katie Davis, Senior Staff Training and Development Specialist, Perkins Coie, LLP and moderated by Rachel Shields Williams, Senior Manager, Experience Management, Sidley Austin LLP. Although the program was not recorded, summarized below are some of the key tools for success that the speakers shared. Hardest part(s) about influencing change? Influencing change is hard because it boils down to knowing that people are messy and complicated. That shows up in a couple of ways: Power dynamics and office politics seriously ...
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